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Thursday, 21 March 2013

play = potential

By Anna

These days, when I see a cardboard box,
no matter how flattened it is, squashed between fifteen other boxes
in a garbage bin covered in dirty snow, I see potential.

When we afford children the freedom to
do whatever they choose with ordinary open-ended materials, one of
the messages we send is: You have potential and the things around
you have potential. There is possibility beyond what we can currently
see or touch.

In her book The Having of Wonderful
Ideas, Eleanor Duckworth writes about the process of teaching and
learning, and makes the case that when we allow children the
freedom to have their own wonderful ideas (to make meaningful
connections based on their own understandings) we support
intellectual exploration to the fullest capacity. She writes, “Having
confidence in one’s ideas does not mean ‘I know my ideas are
right’; it means ‘I am willing to try out my ideas’.”

How useful this is in life, how
empowering it is to possess the willingness to try out ideas to
play through something we are curious about. How satisfying it
can be to recognize the potential in the everyday “stuff”, the
very ordinary world around us. Unfortunately, opportunities
for children to engage in this process are few and far between.

My own two daughters are almost 7
(shocking!) and 3.5 years old. They are both at school and I am
buried at the library, working. But, when I pick them up, in the
midst of dinner, homework, baths, and their passionate arguments
about personal space and property, I will try to hold onto this idea
of potential. Not the vision of the future, of what my girls
will become or what they should be learning now for the sake of
tomorrow, but of the potential that is all around us in the moment -
today.

And when my girls covet other people’s
recycling, when they pull me by the arm across the street so they can
show me the amazing treasure they’ve spotted in someone else’s
bin, I think I understand real joy. I understand that they see
potential, too.

There must be six hundred different
words that we could associate with play. For each post, I will choose
one.

play = potential

This is the first in a series of short written pieces from Anna on play. To find out more about our work, please visit our website and like us on facebook.

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